The role of the wartime Prime Minister Alois Elias in resisting the Nazi
occupation has always been considered an ambiguous one. While the stance
of the Protectorate government at the time was without doubt
collaborationist, Elias himself still tried to uphold the integrity of the
Czech people. Now new evidence has emerged showing his involvement in a
plot to assassinate a number of prominent Nazi journalists, making it
increasingly clear that Elias was anything but a traitor.

Alois Elias
On the 2nd of October 1941, wirelesses all over the country broadcast the
announcement of the execution of Prime Minister Alois Elias, one of the
most paradoxical figures in Czech wartime politics. Despite collaborating
with the Germans for the early part of the occupation, this figurehead of
the Czech puppet government was continually a thorn in the side of the
Nazi regime, maintaining contact with the exiled Czechoslovak government
in London, and supporting underground resistance. It was for this that he
was eventually executed by the Nazis.

Recent findings suggest that Elias took a more direct approach to
resistance than was previously thought, becoming involved in a plot to
assassinate 7 Nazi sympathisers amongst the Czech press. Jan Uhlir, of the
Prague Military History Institute, explains:

"We are effectively filling in smaller tiles into a larger
mosaic, so
that we have a more complete picture of events. A part of this mosaic was
our research into the attempted elimination of the so-called
"activist journalists", the seven most famous Nazi journalists
of Czech origin in 1941, and into the part played by the Prime Minister of
the time, General Alois Elias, in these events. Elias believed that these
journalists were influencing Czech society to such an extent that they
were too dangerous to be left alone and he wanted to relieve them of their
duties. He got together with his pharmacist and together they came up with
a plan."

Prime Minister Alois Elias
And so the plot took shape: Prime Minister Elias himself bought sandwiches
from a local delicatessen, which were then delivered to a friend, a
pharmacist, who injected lethal doses of typhus and tuberculosis bacteria
along with the meat-sausage infection known as botulotoxin into them. The
seven dissident journalists were invited to visit government headquarters,
on the pretence of a discussion about the imminent offensive against
Russia, the poisoned sandwiches were served and the venom began to take
effect:

"Following a long illness, after the first indications of poison
were
revealed, Karel Laznovsky passed away. Laznovsky's pro-Nazi work had
praised the efficiency of the occupation even earlier than Emanuel
Moravec, who was later the top of these collaborators. But in total, out
of the seven who were present at the gathering, only four fell victim to
the disease. That means that either not all reacted to the dose of
bacteria as expected, or that they didn't take a poisoned sandwich at all,
as only five of all the portions laid out contained the
poison."

Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Herman Frank
Historians had suspected such a plan on the part of Alois Elias for some
time, but only recently has concrete evidence been discovered, in the form
of Laznovsky's post mortem records and above all the notes of Elias'
pharmacist. But the research revealed that this attempt was merely the tip
of the iceberg. As Jan Uhlir explains, the pair had much grander schemes
in
mind:

"Prime Minister Elias along with the very same pharmacist
intended to
try and eliminate the then Secretary of State, Karel Herman Frank, by the
same or similar means, but in the end they had no opportunity to do so.
Had Reinhard Heydrich not been named Reichsprotektor and had Elias not
been arrested and sentenced to death, it's possible they would have tried
to see the
plan to fruition: eliminating the Nazi's number two man in the
Protectorate, State Secretary Frank."

In the end, Alois Elias gave his own life for the sake of the integrity of
the Czech nation, executed for betraying the German Reich. For this most
ambivalent of Czech politicians, one man's bread can be another man's
poison, in more ways than one.